Email Unsubscribe Rate: How to Calculate It and When to Worry

Your email unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who got your email and unsubscribed from it. To get it, divide unsubscribes by delivered emails and multiply by 100. There's no single normal number to aim for, so compare each send with your own baseline for the same kind of email to the same segment. Hayes Media, an eCommerce growth agency for DTC and Shopify brands, reads it per send and per segment. When it climbs, change who you mail and how often.

What's an email unsubscribe rate?

It's the percentage of people who received an email and used it to leave your list. Each unsubscribe is a subscriber telling you they don't want this email from you, or don't want it this often.

The number matters for two reasons. It's a direct read on whether a send matched the people who got it. And every unsubscribe shrinks the list you can sell to.

It sits next to the other per-send numbers you already watch. Open rate is harder to trust than it used to be, as our guide to email open rate benchmarks explains, and click to open rate tells you whether the content earned a click. Unsubscribe rate tells you whether people wanted the email at all.

How do you calculate your unsubscribe rate?

Formula: Unsubscribe rate = unsubscribes divided by delivered emails, times 100.

Delivered means emails that reached a mailbox, so emails sent minus bounces. A bounced email never reached anyone who could unsubscribe, so leaving bounces in the denominator makes the rate look lower than it is. Our guide to hard bounces and soft bounces covers what each type means and when to suppress an address.

Check which number your platform divides by, sent or delivered, before you compare figures from different tools or with any number you read online. Whatever definition you use, keep it the same every time so your history stays comparable.

What's a normal unsubscribe rate for an eCommerce brand?

There isn't a single normal number to aim for. Your own baseline is the number to compare with.

Your baseline is the rate your sends usually land at when nothing unusual has changed. Build it from your own campaign history. A promotional campaign to your engaged subscribers has one baseline. A broad newsletter to your whole list has another. A flow email, like the second email in your welcome series, has its own.

Then the question changes from "Is this rate good?" to "Is this rate unusual for this kind of send to this audience?" The second question has an answer you can act on.

Why read unsubscribes per send and per segment instead of as a list average?

Because a list average mixes the people who are happy with the people who are leaving, so you can't tell which group changed.

One send to a cold segment can drive a wave of unsubscribes while your regular sends to engaged buyers carry on as normal, and the list average barely moves.

Reading per send tells you which email caused it. Reading per segment tells you which group of people it happened in. You need both to know what to change.

Useful splits are how recently someone opened or clicked, whether they've bought from you, how they joined your list (a pop-up discount, checkout, a giveaway), and how many emails they've had from you lately.

What does a spike in unsubscribes tell you?

A spike tells you a specific send reached people who didn't want it, and the segment split tells you who they are.

Look at what changed right before it. Two changes are worth checking first.

A frequency change. If you moved from one campaign a week to several, the people who unsubscribe on the extra sends are telling you their limit. They may have been happy at the old pace. If you changed send times at the same moment, our guide to the best time to send email covers how to test timing against your own results.

A broad send. If a campaign went to your whole list, including people who haven't opened or clicked in a while, split the unsubscribes by engagement. If they cluster in the group that had gone quiet, mail that group less often, or stop mailing it.

Either way, the spike is useful information. It's the cheapest way your subscribers can tell you to send less, or send to fewer people.

What does a spike look like in a worked example?

Here's one with made-up numbers, to show the method.

A store usually sends one campaign a week to 20,000 delivered subscribers who've opened or clicked recently. A typical send gets 30 unsubscribes. That's 30 divided by 20,000, times 100, which is 0.15%.

For a sale, the store sends to its whole list instead: 60,000 delivered. That send gets 240 unsubscribes, which is 0.4%. Read as one number, it looks like the sale email was the problem.

Split by segment and the picture changes. The 20,000 engaged subscribers produced 32 unsubscribes, or 0.16%, close to their usual 0.15%. The other 40,000, who hadn't engaged recently, produced 208 unsubscribes, or 0.52%.

So the sale email was fine for the people who usually get it. The jump came from mailing people who'd stopped paying attention. In this made-up case, the fix sits with who gets the next broad send. The email itself can stay.

Why is an unsubscribe cheaper than a spam complaint?

An unsubscribe removes one person from your list, and you stop mailing them. A spam complaint is more than a request to leave. It's a report about your email to the company that runs their inbox, such as Gmail or Yahoo.

So keep your unsubscribe link easy to find. Someone who wants to leave and can't find the link still has the spam button. Hiding the link to lower your unsubscribe rate can send those people to a complaint instead. Our guide on why emails go to spam covers what Gmail and Yahoo publish about complaints, in their own words.

What should you change when your unsubscribe rate climbs?

Change who gets the email and how often, then give people a middle option between everything and nothing.

Segment by engagement

Send your regular campaigns to people who've opened, clicked or bought recently, and mail the rest less often, with your strongest offers. Define "recently" against your own purchase cycle. A store selling something people rebuy often will draw that line differently from a store selling a once-a-year item.

Set frequency per segment

Your engaged buyers and your quiet subscribers don't need the same cadence. If unsubscribes rose after you added sends, test the old cadence on part of the list and compare unsubscribes and orders per recipient between the two groups.

Offer preference options

A preference page lets someone choose fewer emails, or only certain topics, instead of leaving. Make it the first thing the unsubscribe link shows, with the full unsubscribe on the same page. Never make leaving harder in the hope of keeping someone.

Use a sunset approach for unengaged subscribers

A sunset approach is a set of rules for subscribers who've stopped engaging. You reduce how often they get mail, send them a short series asking whether they still want to hear from you, and then stop mailing the ones who don't respond. It keeps your regular sends going to people who read them.

Past customers who went quiet are a separate case. Before you sunset a buyer, try a winback flow for lapsed customers.

Check what the sign-up promised

If one kind of email keeps driving unsubscribes, compare it with what people signed up for. A subscriber who joined for a discount code and then gets long brand stories may leave, and that tells you about the gap between the sign-up offer and what lands in the inbox.

When is a high unsubscribe rate fine?

When it comes from a send you made on purpose to clean your list, or from people you'd want off it anyway.

A re-permission send. If you ask unengaged subscribers whether they still want your emails, unsubscribes are the point. Each one is a person you'd stop mailing anyway.

A first send to an old segment. If you're mailing people you haven't contacted in a long time, the rate on that send isn't comparable with your baseline. Treat it as cleanup and judge the segment on what it does after.

A small send. On a few hundred delivered emails, a handful of unsubscribes moves the percentage a lot. Wait until you have more sends to that segment before you change anything.

A send that also brought in orders. If a broader send raised unsubscribes and also brought in orders you wouldn't otherwise have had, weigh both. The question is whether the revenue was worth the subscribers you lost, and whether a narrower send could have brought in most of it.

None of that applies if the spike is on your engaged buyers, repeats across several normal sends, or comes with a rise in spam complaints. That's when to stop and look at the list, the frequency and the content together.

How does Hayes Media handle unsubscribe rate for clients?

Hayes Media reads unsubscribes per send and per segment as part of running a brand's email program, and changes segments and cadence based on what each spike shows.

Hayes Media's retention practice covers email, SMS, loyalty programs and subscribe-and-save. We work in Klaviyo for most accounts and have experience in most other email and SMS platforms, so a brand on another tool is still a fit. Email on its own is a complete engagement, and we judge the work on lifetime gross profit to CAC, which is why who stays on your list matters to us.

On email.hayesmedia.co, Hayes lists "$500M+ Client revenue driven", "15x Average ROI" and "8 yrs Retention expertise", and says it's "Trusted by 50+ eCom brands". Those figures are published by Hayes on its own site. Hayes has no third-party review profile and no Klaviyo partner listing, so weigh them as our own account of our work.

We typically work with brands doing at least $100K per month in revenue. It's a guideline, not a gate. A smaller brand with a clear budget set aside to scale and real order volume can still be a fit. Our email marketing audit guide walks through what we check in a program, and the email and SMS service page covers how we run one.

Sources. Hayes Media retention figures and terms, fetched for this article: https://email.hayesmedia.co/

If your unsubscribe rate has jumped and you can't see why, a discovery call gets you an audit of your email program: your segments, your sending cadence, your unsubscribe and complaint numbers per send, and what to change first. No onboarding fees. No lock-in contracts. No junior marketers. Book a discovery call